Corduroy Mansions cm-1

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The thought occurred to him that Marcia had found a flat for Eddie. That would be all very well, but the problem lay not so much in the finding of flats - there were plenty of those - but in getting Eddie to move into one of them.

  ‘You’ve found somewhere suitable for him?’ he asked. ‘He’s difficult, you know. He’s very fussy when it comes to flats. Corduroy Mansions seems to suit him rather too well.’

  Marcia shook her head. ‘No, I haven’t found him a flat. But I’ve found a way of encouraging him to move out. It’s something you and I have already discussed.’

  William poured two shots of espresso into a cup and brought it over to Marcia.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘Strong.’

  She looked at him appreciatively. ‘Remember you said you’d had the idea of getting a dog. You said that Eddie can’t stand dogs and that if you got one, then he would probably be inclined to move out. Remember?’

  William laughed. ‘Yes, I do. I had planned that but the problem, you see, is that I can’t envisage keeping a dog for ever. What would happen once Eddie had taken the hint? You can’t take dogs back to the . . .’ - he waved a hand in the air - ‘to the dog place.’

  ‘But—’

  William was emphatic. ‘No, you can’t.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Marcia, rather crossly. ‘But the point is that you could have a temporary dog.’ She paused, taking a sip of her espresso. William made such delicious coffee, and yet there he was single; such a waste . . . ‘Let me explain. I was catering for a dinner party in Highgate the other night. Quite a do, and some fairly well-known faces there. The host is a newspaper columnist. Not that I read him. But somebody must, I suppose. Always preaching to people, telling them what to do; holier than thou. Anyway, when I took things round before the guests arrived I got talking to him. They have this dog, you see. Odd sort of creature. A mongrel, I’d say, but he said it was a Pimlico Terrier. Now there’s a coincidence - you living in Pimlico. Have you ever heard of Pimlico Terriers? No? Neither have I.’

  She took another sip of her coffee. ‘Anyway, he said that they liked this dog but they wished they had some sort of dog-sharing arrangement. He said that they had friends who had a set-up like that - the dog was shared by two households. If one set of people had to go away, the dog went to the other. It divided its time.’

  William nodded. ‘A useful arrangement. People sometimes have that sort of thing for their elderly relatives.’

  ‘Exactly. So it occurred to me: why don’t you talk to them about sharing this Pimlico Terrier with them? You need a dog, but not a full-time dog. They have a full-time dog that they would like to convert into a part-time dog. If job-sharing is all the rage, then why not dog-sharing?’

  10. Oedipus Snark MP

  Jenny was on her way to Dolphin Square, where she was to meet Oedipus Snark for what he described as dictée. She had asked him why he called it that, and he had replied, ‘Dictation, my dear Jennifer, is such an authoritarian word. If I were to give you dictation, I would feel so like a . . . like a Conservative. Dictators, no doubt, give dictation. Whereas dictée is what we used to have at the Lycée in South Kensington. Our dear teacher, Madame Hilliard, would dictate a complicated passage to us - Proust perhaps, with its dreadfully long sentences - and we poor élèves would write it all down in our little cahiers. So sweet. That’s why I call this taking of letters on your part dictée rather than dictation. See?’

  Oedipus Snark had an annoying habit of adding see? to his observations. At first Jenny had been largely unaware of it, but then, after she had worked for him for a few weeks, she became acutely conscious of it and resented it greatly. She had even sent a letter about it to an agony aunt, in which she had written: ‘I work for a man in public life. He has his good points, I am sure, but I am finding his turn of phrase more and more irritating. At the end of many of his sentences he adds the word “see”. He is not Welsh; when Welsh people say that, or “look you”, it sounds rather nice, but he is not Welsh. Should I say something to him about this, or should I try to put it out of my mind? The work is otherwise interesting and I do not want to lose my job.’

  The agony aunt had published this letter, and her reply.

  Dear Anxious,

  There is often nothing worse than some little mannerism in others that we become aware of and then look out for. I have a teenage son who adds ‘and stuff’ to virtually everything he says. When I ask him what time it is, he says, ‘It’s eight, and stuff.’ By comparison, what your boss says is mild, although I fully understand that my telling you that other people have worse verbal mannerisms must be scant consolation. I always remember the advice given by a rather wise psychiatrist, who said, ‘the contemplation of the toothache of another in no way relieves one’s own toothache’. That, I think, is broadly true.

  What should you do? Well, the same doctor also said, ‘verbalisation precedes resolution’. And that, I think, is also very true. So I suggest that you talk to your boss and say that there is a little matter that is worrying you. Stress that it’s just you - that it’s an odd sensitivity you have - and then tell him what it is. My bet is that if you are frank - and if you mention that you have many faults yourself - he will be accommodating and will try to stop. Alternatively, of course, he may sack you.

  The final part of this advice had persuaded Jenny that perhaps it was best not to say anything, and so she merely closed her ears to the ‘see’. And there was so much else to take exception to in Oedipus Snark that linguistic mannerisms were soon overshadowed. Jenny became used to the false excuses that he gave - ‘diplomatic excuses’, he called them - but still it made her uncomfortable to be party to them. Like all MPs, he received regular invitations to visit schools and libraries in his constituency, and he was in the habit of turning all of these down, without exception. ‘I shall, alas, be tied up with parliamentary business on that day’ was the standard excuse. It was then followed by fulsome praise of the school’s efforts: ‘May I take this opportunity to tell you how many people have expressed their admiration for the high standards that your school has achieved over the last year. I really must congratulate you: it is not easy to motivate students in these distracting days, and you seem to achieve this with conspicuous success.’ This was said to every school, and had even once been inserted into a letter to a local baker, who had written about European regulations and their baneful effect on small bakers.

  For invitations to functions that were several months away, more inventive excuses were necessary. It was difficult to turn down an invitation received in, say, March for an event that was to take place in October. But Oedipus Snark was not loth to do this, and he had even told a pensioners’ action group that he could not attend a meeting planned for six months hence. ‘I very much regret that I shall be unable to attend,’ he dictated, ‘on the grounds that . . .’ He paused, and looked at Jenny as if for inspiration. ‘On the grounds that I shall be attending a funeral on that day. There!’ he said. ‘That settles that.’

  Jenny looked up from her notebook. ‘But . . .’ she began. ‘But, how could you know? Funerals are usually arranged only a few days beforehand. They’ll know that you can’t possibly be booked to go to a funeral six months ahead.’

  Oedipus Snark glared at her. ‘Oh yes?’ he challenged. ‘And what about cases where people are given six months to live? You have heard of those, I take it? Well, there you are. It’s perfectly possible that if somebody has been given six months to live and has told his friends, they’ll pencil his funeral in the diary. Perfectly possible.’ And to underline his point, he added, ‘See?’

  Jenny had bitten her lip, both in reality and metaphorically. She told herself that she was not in a position to change him in any respect and that she should therefore simply accept him for what he was. After all, he was a democratically elected Member of Parliament, even if the turn-out in his constituency at the election had been only thirty-two per cent. He had been chosen, and it was not for her to dispute the choice
of his electors. In those circumstances, her job was to help him to do the job that he had been elected to do; or to avoid doing it, as was the case with him. But she realised that she did not like him, and never could. And that, she later discovered, was exactly what Oedipus Snark’s own mother thought about him too.

  ‘Don’t talk to me about my son,’ Berthea Snark had said to Jenny when she first met her. ‘Just don’t talk to me about him.’

  11. A Flexible Diary

  Oedipus Snark’s two-bedroom flat in Dolphin Square was on the third floor, affording him a wide view, just above the tops of the trees, of the unlikely Italianate gardens. It was a place much favoured by politicians. ‘From my window,’ he was fond of saying, ‘I can see into the flats of twenty-two other members of the House of Commons. With binoculars, of course.’

  He knew the locations of the many political landmarks: the house where de Gaulle had lived and from which he had run his campaign, the counterpoint to that infamous hotel in Vichy; the flat where Lord Haw-Haw had stayed; the one where Christine Keeler had entertained; and so on. ‘Success in politics, ’ he had explained to Jenny when she first went to work for him, ‘is purely about one’s address book. There is only one person who can afford not to have an address book, Jenny. You know who that is?’

  She did not. ‘Who?’

  ‘I’ll tell you some other time,’ he said.

  It was typical of the evasive answers to which she would soon become accustomed. Even a simple question - such as an enquiry as to what time it was - could be evaded. ‘It’s rather late,’ he said to her once when her watch had stopped and she had asked him the time.

  ‘But what’s the actual time?’

  He looked at his wristwatch. ‘After four,’ he said, ‘and I must get up to the House.’

  That answer, she reflected, revealed two things about his personality. The first was this tendency not to provide an answer to a question, however innocuous; the second was the extent to which the universe - even time - revolved around him. Four o’clock was four o’clock universally - at least for the sixty-odd million people living in the GMT zone - but for Oedipus Snark the significance of four o’clock was what it meant in his life, according to the exigencies of his diary for that day.

  Jenny arrived shortly before ten that morning to find Oedipus Snark sitting in the converted bedroom that served as his office. It was not a large room, but it was big enough to hold two desks - a generously proportioned one for him and an extremely small one for Jenny. In fact, Jenny had earlier discovered that her desk came from a primary school that had closed down and sold off its furniture cheaply. The desk’s provenance had been revealed by the initials carved by a child into the underside of the lid, and also by the small pieces of dried chewing gum parked underneath. When she had pointed these out to Oedipus Snark, he had laughed.

  ‘I remember doing that as a boy,’ he said. ‘I used to stick chewing gum under the dining-room table and then take it out and revive it by dipping it in the sugar bowl.’

  Jenny winced. Could germs survive in the medium of dried-up gum, or did they die a gummy death? She extracted her handkerchief from her bag and used it to prise the small nodules of gum off the wood. Oedipus Snark watched her, amused.

  ‘You’re not one of these people who’re pathologically afraid of germs, are you?’ he asked. ‘Like the late Howard Hughes. The germs eventually got him, of course.’

  ‘No. It’s just that I don’t like the idea of little pieces of gum on my desk. It is a school desk, isn’t it? For a very small child?’

  Oedipus Snark frowned. ‘Don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Compact, I suppose. But that’s an advantage these days.’ He paused. ‘Going back to germs, tell me what do you do with the handles of public loos? Do you touch them?’

  Jenny looked away. She was not sure whether she wanted to talk about that. As it happened, she made sure that she never touched such handles with her hands, and would resort to gymnastics, pulling the chain with her foot if necessary, rather than risk the very obvious bacterial contamination that awaited those unwise enough to put their hands on such things. But she was not going to tell Oedipus Snark that.

  ‘What do you do?’ she asked.

  He sniffed. ‘I am not one of those obsessive-compulsive types,’ he said. ‘And we all know that a few germs are necessary for the immune system to keep itself in trim. That’s why there’s so much asthma these days - people are not exposed to enough germs.’

  She realised that he had not answered her question. She persisted. ‘So you don’t touch the handle?’

  Oedipus Snark nonchalantly picked up a piece of paper from his desk and began to read it. ‘This is a letter from Lou Portington. Remember her? Rather large party. There’s one loo I wouldn’t touch, even with gloves on! Hah! See?’

  Jenny settled herself at her minuscule desk and picked up her notebook.

  Oedipus Snark continued: ‘She wants me to go to a dinner she’s holding for the French Ambassador. At her place. How kind of her.’

  Jenny made a note in her notebook. ‘And the date?’

  Oedipus Snark put down the letter. ‘Problema. La Portington has alighted on the twenty-second, which no doubt suits His Excellency but which is the evening I’ve agreed to speak at that substance abuse conference. I was due to open it, wasn’t I?’

  Jenny consulted a diary. ‘Yes. You agreed to that eight months ago. They wrote the other day with the programme. You’re on at seven-thirty. The first plenary session.’

  ‘Pity,’ said Oedipus Snark.

  ‘Yes.’ Jenny made another note in her book. ‘Shall I write and give your regrets?’

  ‘Please do. Say that I’m terribly sorry, but I just can’t manage it.’

  Jenny nodded. ‘I’m sure that she’ll find plenty of people happy to have dinner with the French Ambassador.’

  Oedipus Snark looked up sharply. ‘I meant that you should give my regrets to the substance abuse people. Usual thing. Sorry to cancel etc., etc. Urgent Party business.’

  She looked at him. Hateful, she thought. Hateful Snark. Dissembling, lying Oedipus.

  12. Berthea Snark

  Those were the very thoughts, as it happened, that Berthea Snark was entertaining about her son at that precise moment - an example of what is known as Proustian synchronicity, where the stream of consciousness of one person matches another’s and where, for a few moments, both flow in the same direction and at the same pace, like waters conjoined. This instance of synchronicity, though, was not all that surprising, for if Oedipus Snark crossed the mind of anybody at any particular time, there was a reasonable chance that his mother was also thinking of him at that same point, given that she thought about him thirty or forty times a day - possibly more. This was not just because she was his mother, but because for the past two years she had been writing her son’s unauthorised biography - a task that required frequent contemplation of the subject. Such is the lot of the biographer: to live with the subject, to inhabit his skin, to enter his mental universe, to such an extent that biographer and subject become one.

  Where a mother writes her son’s biography, this notion of becoming one with the subject has, of course, an additional, striking resonance. She and Oedipus had indeed been one, when she had nurtured the Liberal Democrat politician in utero. Not that a pregnant woman thinks of the baby she is carrying as being political: a mother may wish for a Liberal Democrat baby, but may not think of the matter as determined. And there is always the possibility that the child will grow in a political direction not contemplated, or approved of, by the parent; how many parents have seen their children espouse views radically different from their own?

  Berthea Snark did not disapprove of her son’s political party, which struck her as being largely benign, perhaps even a touch too well-meaning, but only a touch. Nor did she disapprove of the parties to which he was in opposition. She quite liked the Labour Party for some of its policies and the Conservatives for some of theirs. It all depends, sh
e said. Why should everybody embrace the herd instinct which required one to regard one set of politicians as being always in the right while demonising another set? But what she did disapprove of was her son’s hypocrisy. He might be a Liberal Democrat on the surface, but he was not, she believed, a liberal democrat inside. And that was a most serious matter. Authenticity, in Berthea’s view, was all.

  As Oedipus Snark discussed with his assistant, Jenny, the breaking of his undertaking of eight months’ standing to open a conference, Berthea Snark was preparing herself a cup of coffee in her house in a small street not far from Corduroy Mansions. This street, a cobbled mews which meandered briefly before ending in a modest row of garages, had become fashionable only recently. Berthea and her husband, Hubert Snark, had not had to pay present-day inflated prices for their home; they had acquired it for a song thirty years ago, when Oedipus was six. The mews house had been his childhood home and the place in which he first dreamed of reaching that promised land only a short distance away - Westminster. For just as small American boys may, in their log cabins, dream of the White House, so may small British boys, in their mews houses, dream of the House of Commons.

  Berthea’s husband had been a largely absent father. When Oedipus was at primary school at the French Lycée in Kensington, Hubert had begun an affair with Jane Sharplie, an Oxford philosophy don and a Fellow of Somerville College, and had drifted away from the marriage. Berthea had been aware of the affair from the beginning; she was, in fact, a colleague and friend of the other woman, and had reviewed one of her books - favourably - in Mind.